Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

The Fogurols invaded lasted week. They are aliens bent on conquering the Earth, requiring the superheroes and supervillains to band together drive them off, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, there are always a few casualties from this sort of thing. This time, the vigilante Pinnacle numbered among our dead.

“But wait,” you say, “wasn’t killing Pinnacle the focus of Project King of the Mountain? Are you trying to tell me they succeeded where our illustrious leader failed?”

First of all, “illustrious?” Suck up.

Second of all, no, I just want the rest of the world to think Pinnacle died during the latest world crisis, which was the plan all along. Considering his connections to the Board of Directors for the Establishment, it was safer for Technefarious if their attention wasn’t focused on wiping me out. I added enough trouble for us by killing Record Holder during my little safari.

So, having pissed off Pinnacle to the point where he would follow me into a trap to get at me, I then had to wait for a worldwide event to distract from our little fight. Those little dustups happen every couple of months on our Earth, so I didn’t expect to be holed up in my cave for too long.

Did I mention the trap was in a cave? Originally enchanted to hold the Thunder Beast’s Shadow long before humans tamed fire, Technefarious annexed the underground prison after the Shadow escaped in the 1960’s. We’ve augmented it over the years with psionic baffles and entropy stabilizers, creating a battleground that nullifies 99% of superpowers. It doesn’t work on me. My physical powers are expressed in my muscles and bones, and fields that cut off external power sources don’t affect those. The insights I get on how to kill anything are trickier to trace, but I’ve never found anything that can block them either.

Interestingly enough, all the power drainers we had at work were not perfectly suited to stripping Pinnacle of his powers either. Even within the cave, my special insights suggested scenarios that would require widely divergent responses on my part to finally bring him down. Frustratingly, my powers were vague on exactly what acts he could perform that wouldn’t be stopped by our fields. Superpowers are just a giant game of rock, paper, scissors sometimes.

Still, the dampening hampered him. That slick power armor he uses to enhance his strength and speed had to come off. As for his famed gadgets and utilities, the fields stripped away their battery power, turning half of them into so much junk. Sure, he still had his smoke bombs, submission sprays, and low ignition chemicals available, but it as a fair fight. After all, I had a knife.

Our battle lasted two hours and six minutes. I suffered seven broken bones, lost three teeth, and had my left ring finger cut off second knuckle. The knife I started with changed hands five times. I was glad when the fight finally finished, because by the end I really, really needed to pee.

After I patched myself up, I dressed Pinnacle in his armor, damaged it to match the injuries he had received during our fight, and then dumped his body in one of the battle sites with the Fogurols. The Establishment will find him there and assume he fell defending the planet. They’ll figure out the truth eventually, I’m sure, but by then, something else will have come along to distract most of the world’s superheroes from what I’d done.

Let’s hope that distraction is our successful enforcement of our rule over the world.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

I’m still waiting for the right time to send Pinnacle his invitation. I’m still bored hiding out in my trap for him. Tried to practice the mediation techniques I learned as a child while being raised by a cult of assassins. Became really bored. Felt less bad about killing every last one of them as an adult. Not that I ever really felt bad about it, or I probably wouldn’t have done it in the first place. Or at least not all of them. I’m rambling. I’m bored.

Maybe this will be the week will be the right time to contact Pinnacle. I hope.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

This week, I kicked off Project King of the Mountain in which I will kill the superhero Pinnacle. Except for my immediate support staff, most of you won’t notice any changes in your usual routines during this project. Frankly, the times I would need to use all of Technefarious to kill one person are few and far between and would usually involve enemies foretold by things like the sky burning or a plague of frogs.

My presence at our home base will spotty for a while. For this project, I’ll be spending most of my hours in Pinnacle’s hometown of Lowplain. Ideally, this assignment would consist of a single strike against the urban vigilante himself. Unfortunately, despite a career spanning decades, no one knows who Pinnacle is. Careful computer analysis of the historical records suggests that this isn’t always the case, but the knowledge of his identity gets purged from our world shortly after his exposure. It is unclear if this is due to magic or some other sort of reality distortion source. We’ve been unable to pry his identity loose using our own tools from those fields since we’ve became aware of his interest in Technefarious, so we’re having to go after him using the roundabout methods of my own “kill anything” powers.

Whatever the full nature of the Pinnacle’s powers, everyone agrees that his combat abilities are those of a highly trained human with access to exotic technology and magic. That I can handle. The hard part is going to be getting him to face me alone. With the death of his spy, I don’t think there’s much way to hide that I’m going to come after him. The problem then becomes how I do I draw him out without him bringing along half of the Establishment with him. Push comes to shove, I could probably still kill him if he did, but I’d like to avoid the war with the Establishment that would kick off.

So, I’m in Lowplain this week. I may not know how to find Pinnacle, but I do know how to get a message to him. Lowplain is notorious for its organized crime, despite Pinnacle’s efforts. The city acts as a gateway to too many locations to stem the tide of illegal goods flowing through it for long. Every time Pinnacle and local law enforcement drives one set of goons under, another set immediately takes their place. I’ve spent the last couple of days entertaining myself by locating dumps of illegal goods and dens of vice. Once I find them, I make it a point to kill the onsite management and most of the armed guards. I leave a few alive and let them know that I’m looking for Pinnacle. I’m sure it will get back to him pretty quickly.

I suppose I could have just highjacked the local airwaves and done the same thing, but I’d like to do this without upsetting the civilian population too much. Our propaganda department tells me that when regular people find out that the killer of the Titanium Android is hunting someone, it tends to upset them. Civilians are much more comfortable when they just think of me as the current leader of Technefarious. After all, Technefarious has failed to properly enforce its rule on the world for decades. As the Killing Man, however, I assassinated the world’s greatest hero.

I’m a bit jealous of those you back at home base this week. The science department has updated the live action Portal course with the new content from Portal 2, so those of you who want to replicate the new game in the real world should have a blast. Please, no more requests to have the lethal threats in the game be made just as deadly in the course. That’s not why I built the Soul Catchers. Besides, the janitorial staff doesn’t want have to clean up corpse after corpse just for your amusement.

Finally, while I was off terrorizing the criminals of Lowplain, I had Frigid arrange our next shipment in the nonsensical gift exchange with our enemies at the Golden Web. I’m curious to see how they’ll react to receiving five semis full of ping-pong balls.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man